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The notorious for-profit Adelanto Detention Center has been gripped by unrest as dozens of migrant detainees, many of whom are asylum seekers, are reported to be on hunger strike to demand their basic human rights.
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The migrants have accused authorities at the San Bernardino, California detention compound, owned by notorious private prison corporation GEO Group, of abusing detainees, setting bonds at “impossibly high levels,” and providing poor medical care, among other grievances.
At present, approximately 33 women are believed to have joined the hunger strike while six of the original nine — known as the #Adelato9 — who launched it Monday have temporarily suspended the action while they negotiate their demands with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials. They will resume the strike Friday if their demands are not met.
The protests began when the nine asylum seekers from El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras announced their intention to stop eating in protest of the wretched conditions at Adelanto.
“We ask for your attention, because Adelanto is one of the prisons which exists for those who are seeking political asylum, and in reality our records are clean, none of us have prior criminal records,” Adelanto 9 spokesperson Isaac Lopez-Castillo said. “The bond is set impossibly high, and it’s a humiliating joke because we are poor, we don’t have that kind of money.”
In a press release the group issued, it cited the denial of the right to political asylum, humiliation and discrimination by guards, paperwork that's only available in English, and poor food. The group demanded new uniforms, complaining that their underwear is filthy and was worn by other people; an end to throwing away the belongings of detainees; clean water and better food; translated paperwork; religious services; and an immediate release of hunger strikers since the group lacked the resources to pay the exorbitant bond amounts.
Since March, three detainees at the infamous compound have died, two for medical reasons and one due to suicide.
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“Adelanto is now the deadliest detention center of 2017,” Javier Hernandez of Inland Coalition for Immigrant Justice said last week in a press release by the Detention Watch Network. “Long before this egregious distinction, Adelanto has been known as a facility where abuse and mismanagement persist.”
In 2015, 26 asylum seekers launched a hunger strike that endured for almost two weeks as detainees protested their prolonged incarceration, also citing unreasonably-priced bonds and sluggish legal proceedings. Earlier this year, nearly half of all detainees at Washington's Northwest Detention Center — also owned by GEO Group — waged a hunger strike for nearly identical reasons.
The nine claim that after presenting their demands and linking arms in the breakfast area during a morning roll call, they were subjected to a vicious attack by guards at the prison, who pepper-sprayed, beat and handcuffed them prior. An ICE spokesperson told Southern California Public Radio that the officers "applied the necessary degree of force to extract the resisting detainees from the residence unit and transfer them to a restricted housing area," euphemistically referring to high-security isolation cells.
"When they saw that they could not remove us, they sprayed us with more pepper spray. And once they were able to pull us out, they threw some of us against the wall. In my case, at least, they threw me up against the glass of the phone booth,” Castillo reported Wednesday in a recording sent to supporters. “They pushed my face up into it, on the corner. And Timoteo was drenched, including his private parts, with pepper spray. Our skin is all covered in rashes, and some have gashes from their fingernails. And one of the guys had his dental crown knocked out. They knocked it out because they threw him face-first against the wall."
“They pulled us out to wash us, but they did that to mess with us even more because all of the guards started insulting us,” Castillo continued. “And they showered us in hot water, and that way the pepper spray activates even more in reaction with the hot water."
The group of asylum seekers had participated earlier this year in a caravan of refugees in Mexico calling attention to the dire plight of Central American refugees, holding a mass convergence in Tijuana on May 9, according to solidarity group Sureñxs en Accion.
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